Shoveling Sand Against The Tide

Retreat has always been anathema to the United States Army, an admirable mindset except when fighting, say, the force of gravity. At that point, courage morphs quickly to stupidity.

"This nation has a large and powerful adversary," proclaimed the US Army Corps of Engineers in one of its early promotional films. "We're fighting Mother Nature. . . . It's a battle we have to fight day by day, year by year; the health of our economy depends on victory." Shortly thereafter it declared victory over the Mississippi: "We harnessed it, straightened it, regularized it, shackled it." As with all declarations of victory over Nature, that one proved premature.

Now, with the era of dams and river gutterization largely over, the Corps is keeping busy by pressing the attack on another front-the sea. At enormous expense to fish, wildlife and taxpayers it "replenishes" beaches with sand. Save for a superb three-part series by Terry Gibson in Florida Sportsman (beginning with the April 2005 issue), sporting and environmental publications are paying scant attention to this issue.

As a conduit for pumping pork, beach replenishment is as efficient as any other Corps activity. Federal taxpayers kick in as much as 65 percent for initial construction ("restoration") and 50 percent for "replenishment," also called "long-term maintenance" (although it's not maintenance at all, but regular replacement every time the beach washes away). For example, $800 million of federal, state and municipal funds have been spent in Florida, $665 million in California, $494 million in New Jersey, $228 million in New York, $161 million in North Carolina, $149 million in Virginia, $106 million in South Carolina, $90 million in Maryland, and $50 million in Louisiana. As a means of saving beaches, however, replenishment is remarkably inefficient. "Twenty-six percent of replenished US Atlantic Coast barrier beaches (from the south shore of Long Island to Miami) were effectively gone in less than one year, while 62 percent lasted between two and five years, and 12 percent (all in southeast Florida) lasted more than five years," reports professor Orrin Pilkey, director of Duke University's Program for the Study of Developed Shorelines.

The Corps and the public have never understood that floods and beach erosion can't be prevented, only postponed, and that postponement devastates fish, wildlife and people. Along the Atlantic shore I have observed volunteers plugging dune blowouts with old Christmas trees, which remained in place just long enough to evict threatened piping plovers from their preferred nesting habitat. "We know when they put their Christmas trees in," remarked one Fire Island National Seashore ranger, "because we get them downdrift a week or so later." On Cape Cod, at the nation's northernmost nesting-site of the diamondback terrapin (a state-threatened species) I inspected the unhappy results of "dune stabilization." Believing that dunes aren't supposed to move, volunteers had planted them with beach grass. But it is the very instability of dunes on which so many species depend. In this case the grass had cooled the sand, and because sex in developing reptile eggs is determined by temperature, virtually all the hatchlings were male.

Some states still allow dunes and beaches to be "stabilized" with sea walls of cement or sand bags. Such structures hold back the ocean for a while until they themselves erode, but when waves break against them the energy is reflected seaward, carrying the sand with it and leaving a deep, rock-lined gully-and a new place for the Corps to pay itself to wage a new battle.

Ninety percent of the sea turtles that nest in US sand make landfall in Florida. Yet no state is more permissive in allowing seawalls which block their access. David Godfrey of the Caribbean Conservation Corporation reports that loggerhead turtles were doing OK in Florida until about six years ago. "Last year we had the lowest documented numbers of nests in 20 years," he says. "At a time when that's happening the policies of the state are particularly troubling to us." When the Fish and Wildlife Service or NOAA Fisheries finds that a project will jeopardize an endangered or threatened species, they must issue a "jeopardy opinion," which means the project can't happen unless the developer implements "reasonable and prudent alternatives." But a year ago a Fish and Wildlife biologist told me he'd been informed by his superiors that the Bush administration has forbidden jeopardy opinions for any species, no matter what.

Imagine the damage to riparian life if the Corps replaced all sediment along 10 miles of the Big Hole River. That's just what it's doing along the coastline. Invertebrates that fuel the entire nearshore ecosystem and on which shorebirds, crabs and juvenile fish depend are wiped out. Marine life is damaged-first when the sand is sucked from the seabed, and second when it is dumped on shallow reefs and beaches. Corps contractors use giant dredges to strip-mine the ocean floor along with all the delicate organisms it sustains, including worms, mollusks, shrimps, crabs, sand eels, sponges, corals and sea grasses. The nearshore ecosystem dies, then the natural beach dies when it's buried, often with incompatible sand. "We're getting bad sand from bad places," Pilkey told me. This "replenishment" sand may be coarser than the natural beach sand, consisting of broken shells or cobbles. When it's bulldozed around the beach it wipes out shorebird nesting habitat, prevents burrowers such as worms, sandfleas, ghost crabs and surf clams from moving back and forth with the tide, blocks the probing bills of shorebirds, and prevents sea turtles from digging nests.

Or the sand may be too fine. "Geologists would call these fine particles 'silts' or 'clays,'" declares Dr. Pete Peterson of the University of North Carolina Institute of Marine Sciences, one of the world's foremost authorities on beach invertebrates. "Everyone else calls it 'mud.' Mud is rapidly eroded and suspended; so, with every storm, you have a source injecting turbidity." This interface between earth, air and sea is the richest life zone in the ocean, Peterson points out. But many of the life forms that evolved here, especially juvenile fish and crustaceans, are filter feeders or have extremely delicate gills. The particles kill them. Mature creatures such as permit, bonefish, snook, striped bass, bluefish, false albacore, bonito, flounders, jacks, pompano, tarpon, Spanish mackerel, pelicans, terns, gulls, gannets, cormorants and sea ducks are sight feeders. Turbidity from beach replenishment prevents them from feeding. In fact, it prevents much of their prey-glass minnows, for instance-from even showing up in the surf zone. "The turbidity extends down the beach for miles, killing organisms beyond the replenishment area," says Peterson. "We've documented violations of state water-quality standards months after projects ended."

"These beach replenishment projects have been a constant source of concern for us," says George Geiger, vice chair of the South Atlantic Fishery Management Council. "We have commented ad nauseum to the Corps, as required through the permitting process. But I don't believe the council's comments have any bearing on potential permits. Under the Sustainable Fisheries Act of 1996 each council has to identify essential fish habitat out to 200 miles. Certainly the nearshore reef complex is essential habitat for all manner of fish-groupers, snappers, grunts, numerous crustaceans. It's a very delicate and complicated system. It's also a waypoint for these fish on their way offshore. And it's being buried knowingly." Supposedly, the Corps "mitigates" this damage by concocting offshore reefs with building rubble. But they don't work for these species; often they don't work for any species.